To a degree. This is what I endeavor to do in High Weirdness, where I try and both exploit the ambiguity of the term (as genre, popular adjective for odd experiences, literary term, analog of “uncanny”, etc) and attach it to a space between matter and aesthetics.

Anthony Bourdain on humanity:
“Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.” RIP pic.twitter.com/0CWxbTcF8V

I don’t know a lot about Bourdain but I know this: He got television about human geography to rate well. He got more Americans thinking about the rest of the world as people, instead of as foreigners, than any other artist or entertainer I can think of. Shit.

Federico Campagna (@FedCampagna)’s TECHNIC AND MAGIC will change the way you think about reality in strange and mysterious ways. Philosophy for the present, bringing together numerous strands of fascinating thinking: https://t.co/HPvZpVQzpH

Daniel Trilling (@trillingual)’s LIGHTS IN THE DISTANCE is the best book yet written about borders and migration in Europe. Based on years of research and personal relationships, this is proper journalism and proper storytelling. Essential reading: https://t.co/CJafxLFygC

Realised I mostly tweet about visual art and tech rants, so with my own book coming out in a couple of weeks I thought I should redress the balance in favour of BOOKS, the best media. Here are some of the more recently published things I’ve read recently, and you should too:

‘The “Crack Manifesto” marked the beginning of the “Crack group,” a collective of five Mexican writers dedicated to breaking with Magical Realism in favor of a return to the complexity of plot & style found in Borges and Cortázar.’ Crack! https://t.co/QRYCHeDd35@Dalkey_Archive

Actually now I’ve given it some thought, clearly the most efficient undersea data storage approach would be to put LEDs on the outside so octopuses can see what’s going on inside. Then your data structures will become cephalopod dialects and live for generations.

Random philosophical thought experiment: would running a real-world Searle’s Chinese Room experiment make one guilty of crimes against humanity, viz. torture? After all, there’s a human in solitary confinement inside it, who is forbidden from communicating their own thoughts …

Unpopular opinion: Dogs are wolves we dragged into the uncanny valley. They are terrifying and eldritch, mankind's living threat to nature that we will take even apex predators and turn them into drooling, misshapen clowns, and they will love us for it.

A groundbreaking study by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is the first to map a pathway to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels without relying on negative emissions technologies that suck carbon dioxide from the the atmosphere, an IIASA press release reported.

Instead, the study published Monday in Nature Energy found that the more ambitious Paris agreement target can be reached through innovations in the energy efficiency of daily activities. Changes to heating, cooling, transport, appliances and technological devices could both limit climate change and meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals to improve quality of life in the global South, the study found.

“Our analysis shows how a range of new social, behavioral and technological innovations, combined with strong policy support for energy efficiency and low-carbon development can help reverse the historical trajectory of ever-rising energy demand,” IIASA acting program director and lead study author Arnulf Grubler said in the press release.

The report focused on innovations that were currently available and calculated what would happen if they were applied at scale. It found that doing so could reduce the energy required for transportation, heating and cooling and meeting the physical needs of the world’s population by two to four times.

The paper further explained that the success of its scenario relied on the willingness of populations, governments and businesses to make the changes it advocates.

Markers on that roadmap included ride-sharing fleets of electric vehicles that could reduce transport energy demand by 60 percent by 2050. Increased energy standards for new buildings and renovations for old ones could reduce energy demand from heating and cooling by 75 percent by 2050. The report further found that changing individual habits on a global scale could make a huge difference. The expanded use of smartphones to do the work of what would have previously been several devices, accompanied by a shift in the younger generation from owning material goods to accessing services as needed could limit the growth in global energy demand to 15 percent by 2050. And following a healthy diet that replaced red meat calories with something else could lower agriculture energy demand and lead to increased forest cover the combined size of Bangladesh and Italy by 2050.

https://t.co/8vMnkGFW9Q“A potent question at such intersecting points of interest being asked, "Are we at the doors of post-cyberfeminism? ” Matthias Gross, author of Ignorance and Surprise, if concepts like Antifa, Bitcoin and Blockchain have any relationship with..“

The UNC on the Law of the Sea states: Artificial islands & other structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own & their presence doesn’t affect the delimitation of territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf.

An African Grey parrot has learnt how to use Alexa/Google Home to get its wishes (despite its owners’ best efforts) The best part is that its name is PETRA! (which will be hilarious to @PETRASiot researchers) > https://t.co/lc2r5D0Vr0

There is a whole critical literature on the concept of trauma that is unknown to most in mental health who assume it is a self-evident and unassailable category. For example, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s “The Empire of Trauma” is a masterpiece on exactly this. https://t.co/dANFnyzdKi

’[Mongolia’s] monasteries are increasingly run by millennial monks, the first generation to come of age after decades of religious repression under the Soviet system wiped out almost all Buddhist clergy.’ https://t.co/YYz2xpjYm1 (Thomas Peter) pic.twitter.com/7KeohdJs9m

Increasingly I hear from people who won’t do something that functions well in their own context because it “won’t scale globally.” The abstract notion of unbound scalability has become a cognitive virus for intellectuals. It will leave them hungry. https://t.co/mi9WgpBUJn

It’s illegal for Uber & Lyft to pickup at SFO’s arrivals level, so they pickup at departures. This has made congestion so bad, there’s now a sign encouraging drop-offs to go to arrivals. So now departures go to arrivals & arrivals go to departures because tech fixes everything.

The intelligence of plants is not merely a shadow of human knowing, and their behavior is not a rudimentary form of human conduct. After all, unlike animal and humans, for whom behavior is most often associated with physical movement, plants behave by changing their states, both morphologically and physiologically. An honest approach to the capacities of plants thus requires a simultaneous acknowledgement of the similarities and differences between them and other living beings. In scientific circles, there is certainly no consensus on the implications of new research data drawn from the behavior of plant cells, tissues, and communities. On the one hand, the opponents of the Copernican Revolution in botany claim that the data do nothing but exemplify what has been known all along about plant plasticity and adaptability. This is the position expressed in the open letter to the journal Trends in Plant Science, signed in 2007 by 36 plant scientists who deemed the extrapolations of plant neurobiology “questionable.” On the other hand, we have the investigations of kin recognition in plants by Richard Karban and Kaori Shiojiri; of plant intelligence by Anthony Trewavas; of plant bioacoustics by Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano; of the sensitivity of root apices as brain-like “command centers” by František Baluška and Dieter Volkmann; of plant learning and communication by Ariel Novoplansky; and of plant senses by Daniel Chamowitz, among many others. Their peer-reviewed research findings no longer fit within the scientific framework where plants are studied as objects, rather than living organisms. Leaving aside the provocative analogies they suggest between plants and animals, doesn’t the drastic change in approach (from plants as objects to plants as subjects) amount to a veritable Copernican Revolution, or Kuhnian paradigm shift, in botany?

“The Kyushu Seidokai has expanded into Tokyo, setting up several front companies, and joined forces with Tadamasa Goto, a former Yamaguchi-gumi boss turned Buddhist priest, who has now re-emerged as a powerful player in Japan’s underworld.”

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet. The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife. The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

“I’m not a methodical literary cook who uses character, genre and plot like ingredients and spices to make a meal, I’m an irresponsible mad scientist gardener who plants things intuitively and is delighted when they grow out of control.”

A new study strongly suggests that at least some memories are stored in genetic code, and that genetic code can act like memory soup. Suck it out of one animal and stick the code in a second animal, and that second animal can remember things that only the first animal knew.

Vivid blue water fills an open-pit mine near the town of Battle Mountain in Lander County, Nevada. Founded in 1861, Lander County made its way onto the map as copper and gold mining boomed there throughout the late 19th century. Today, fewer than 6,000 people live in the 5,500-square-mile county.